by Eric Meyer
“Any idea what’s in the crates?” Paul said as we neared Vung Tau.”
I had wondered too what was inside them, but in Vietnam is was not always wise to know everything. Some things were best kept hidden.
“None of our business, my friend, and I want it to stay that way.”
He nodded his agreement. We landed at Vung Tau in the early evening, as we were taxiing towards the freight hangar Paul said, “I could murder a cold beer before we take off again.”
It was an attractive idea, it was getting dark and we would be staying overnight before unloading the crates in the morning and returning to Saigon.
“Me too, I’m sure the airport bar will accommodate us.”
Then a mortar round hit the tarmac immediately in front of the aircraft and the port wheel dropped into the crater, we heard the snap as the leg collapsed and I quickly shut down the engines as the aircraft slewed violently to the left.
We shuddered to a stop as another mortar round exploded nearby. There was no need to say anything to each other, we both ran for the locker at the rear of the cockpit and took out weapons, the M2s, the fully automatic variant of the famous M1 carbine together with our two Tokarev pistols. We had tried carrying AK-47s, but their distinctive shape had once brought friendly fire down on us while we were on the ground in the Mekong Delta, guarding a shipment of vehicle parts, or so the crates said. After that, we bought the more expensive M2 which hopefully would not be the cause of any mistaken identity.
Paul pushed open the fuselage door and we jumped down, the first thing we saw was the port leg, smashed beyond use. The second was the flashes of gunfire and exploding mortar rounds. A harassed looking ARVN lieutenant came running over to us.
“It’s a VC attack, you need to find somewhere to get under cover.”
“How many of them are there?” I asked him.
“How many?” He looked surprised that I had even bothered to ask the question. “I don’t know, maybe ten or twelve.”
“Are you engaging them, Lieutenant?” Paul asked him.
“Well, we’ve got a Marine company here, I expect they’re forming up now to counter-attack.”
“In that case,” I said reasonably, “we should be safe, a company will surely take care of them. We’ll stay with the aircraft, just in case any of them slip past you.”
He shrugged. “As you wish,” he said, angry that we weren’t taking his advice, “but keep your heads down, this isn’t a game you know.”
He said it so gravely that Paul and I had to look away to stop ourselves from laughing and embarrassing him further, which would not have earned us any favours.
“Thank you, Lieutenant, we’ll bear it in mind,” I replied courteously.
He ran off to find his unit. We took cover in the crater, crouched next to the port wheel of our Douglas.
“It seems you were wrong, my friend,” Paul said to me.
“Wrong?” I looked at him, puzzled. He pointed across the field, four shadowy shapes were running towards us, their intention was obvious.
“About it not being our business. It seems that these gentlemen have made it out business.”
We clicked the selectors of our rifles to full auto and waited.
*****
The message on Vietnam is the same: vigorous American action is needed to buy time for Vietnam to mobilize and organize its real assets; but the time for such a turnaround has nearly run out. And if Vietnam goes, it will be exceedingly difficult if not impossible to hold Southeast Asia.’
General Maxwell Taylor
The President was looking at a cable in his hand. He was sat awkwardly on the couch in the Oval Office, one of his bad days for the injury he still suffered from twenty years after his patrol boat was shot out from under him in the China seas. He looked up.
“Robert, you’ve seen this?”
Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense, nodded. “Yes, Mr President, I have. I contacted General Harkins at MACV in Saigon and asked him for his opinion too.”
Kennedy looked around the room. Who could he trust to give him an honest opinion about the war in Vietnam? The only one here he could really trust had no real influence with the military, his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, Attorney General. The two brothers exchanged glances. Kennedy looked back at McNamara. “Go on, what does he say?”
“He concurs, Sir. Our troops, our advisors, are making a difference, but there just aren’t enough of them. With a few thousand more troops, the communists can be beaten and the South Vietnamese government will be able to hold their own.”
“Yeah, so you keep telling me.” He sighed and looked around the room.
“Look, all this advice I’m getting, then word comes in from this,” he paused and shuffled through papers on the low table in front of him. “Lieutenant Colonel Vann. These South Vietnamese troops together with units of our own people outnumbered the Viet Cong five or maybe even ten to one!”
He raised his voice and the advisors looked at each other uncomfortably. Upsetting the leader of the free world was not a good way to handle your career.
“Ten to fucking one, anyone got any ideas, people? These communists field a hundred thousand men, you want me to send a million Americans to fight them and even then we might not win? Because that’s what these figures tell me. Bobby, what’s your take on this?”
The others barely concealed their sneers. A staunch supporter of civil rights, Bobby Kennedy was no friend of the more militaristic members of Kennedy’s cabinet. They joked about his lack of experience, even his own brother President Kennedy had laughed at the criticisms of Bobby and said, ‘I can't see that it's wrong to give him a little legal experience before he goes out to practice law.’ But what he lacked in experience he made up for with a razor sharp mind. Architect of his brother’s successful presidential campaign, he had no direct influence on this meeting. But the President wanted someone he could trust to help him steer his way through the minefield of personal political agendas and prejudices that were part of every president’s cabinet.
“Has anyone read the history of these Vietnamese people?” Bobby asked unexpectedly. “For the past thousand years, these people have been fighting one foreign invader after another. China, Laos, Cambodia, you name it, they’ve scrapped with them. And when they’re not fighting someone else, they’re fighting each other. These aren’t a bunch of slant eyed rice farmers with the thoughts of Ho Chi Minh in one hand and an AK47 in the other. They’re hard and they’re tough. Sure, this current bunch are communists, but if they weren’t commies they’d be called by some other name. Fact is, they’re no pushover, anyone that says different hasn’t done their homework. Sure, our boys are tough too, but the South Vietnamese? Fact is, Diem doesn’t want them to fight the commies too hard, as long as they keep him in power.”
McGeorge 'Mac' Bundy, the National Security Advisor, spoke up. “These people threaten the stability of the whole of South East Asia, Bobby. No matter how tough they are, they’re a direct threat to U.S. foreign policy and trade in the region, they need to be beaten.”
Kennedy looked at them tiredly. “Ok, so we know what we need, we know the problem, so what do we do? Send more troops?”
Robert McNamara muttered under his breath.
“What? What was that Robert?”
“I said Diem needs to go,” the Secretary of Defense said.
Bobby jerked upright. “Jesus Christ, Robert, he’s the head of state.”
“He’s a number one pain in the ass,” McNamara said. “He singlehandedly invented the word corruption, his brother’s an opium addict and he terrorizes any of the population that aren’t Catholic, and that’s the vast majority, they’re Buddhists and they hate him. Get rid of Diem and the war is winnable, otherwise...” He let his words hang.
“Ok, ok, let’s tie this up. Bottom line, do we send more advisors or not?” He looked around and received affirmative nods.
“Very well, Robert, get me some figures and I’ll take a look a
t them. Stay behind, would you. That’s it, thanks.”
They drifted out, the great and the good who steered the fate of the free world. When they were alone, Kennedy turned to his Secretary of Defense. “About Diem, Robert, I want a report, I especially want to know who would replace him if the worse came to the worse. Thank you.”
“Thank you, Mr President.”
* * * * *
Chapter Two
‘Secretary McNamara summed up such concerns in 1962 when he told Congress that US strategy was to assist indigenous forces in Third World crises rather than commit US forces to combat there. Avoiding direct participation in the Vietnam war, he said, would not only release US forces for use elsewhere, but would be the most effective way to combat Communist subversion and covert aggression in Vietnam: To introduce white forces, US forces, in large numbers there today, while it might have an initial favorable military impact would almost certainly lead to adverse political and in the long run adverse military consequences.’
US Library of Congress
It seemed obvious that our aircraft was the intended target of the four infiltrators. The normal VC tactic was to strip the contents from the aircraft, especially if they thought it contained arms or military equipment, and then destroy the plane. In this case with the whole airfield a battlefield it seemed unlikely they would take the time to pillage so they were probably planning to just destroy our C-47. We waited until they got within fifty yards, sure enough we could see that they were already removing the pins from their grenades. We opened fire in the same instant, after so many battles and so many wars, we were both able to finely judge the moment. They didn’t stand a chance, we dropped all four between our first two bursts. They tumbled to the ground, some screaming in agony, then the grenades went off and we ducked lower as shrapnel flew through the air. The screams stopped and we looked around again. There was a firefight in progress at the terminal building, difficult to make out in the dark, but we could distinguish the sounds of the AK-47s carried by the communists and the sharper crack of the M16s, the new infantry rifle developed from the Armalite AR-15, increasingly being adopted by the ARVN. The sounds of the AK-47s were gradually petering out as the shooters were either killed or crept away in the darkness.
Eventually it all went quiet, the lights blazed again in the terminal building and a siren sounded the all clear. We climbed out of our hole to check the VCs we had shot, but they were all dead, either from our bullets or shredded from their own grenades that exploded after they were hit. We returned the rifles to the aircraft, it wouldn’t do for unidentified civilians to be walking around carrying rifles. The sentries would be nervous enough for the rest of the night in case a second wave of attackers came, but we still had our automatics tucked into our waistbands. Finally we walked cautiously to the terminal building and went in. There was no damage, the attack hadn’t got that far, they’d even restarted the sound system, Ray Charles was singing, 'I Can't Stop Loving You’ softly in the background. We found a telephone and I called Johann Drexler. As expected he was in our office inside the hangar at Tan Son Nhat, we liked to keep someone there to stop the locals from pilfering our supplies and shipments. I told him about the damage.
“I’ve got a spare leg here, Jurgen, I can bring it to you in the jeep and do the repair,” he said. “What about the wheel and the tyre, is that damaged?”
I thought for a moment, then told him to bring a spare wheel and tyre as well, it was unlikely that they were completely undamaged. He promised to go and speak to Helene and leave for Vung Tau in the morning, about a two hour drive cross country. Then we went to the terminal office where I filed a report of the damage and amended our flight plan to leave later the next day.
We eventually got our cold beer at the bar, which had already re-opened. There was a big crowd of ARVN troopers already drinking, I briefly wondered why they were not out mopping up after the attack, chasing down the VCs who had got away. But only it was only a brief thought. It was an open secret that President Diem feared and despised his majority Buddhist population as much as he did the Viet Cong. He deliberately spared the ARVN troops from engagements that might risk them taking heavy casualties. That way he hoped to keep them as a loyal reserve in case his own people tried to depose him by force, as well as not incur the army’s wrath by forcing them to undertake dangerous assignments. To say that Diem’s rule was authoritarian was to understate the case. His most trusted official was his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, leader of the primary pro-Diem Can Lao political party. He was an opium addict and fervent admirer of another corrupt, authoritarian dictator, Adolf Hitler, the architect of Germany’s misfortune. Both Paul and I still bore many scars from Hitler’s disastrous attempt to rule Europe.
Indeed, Diem modelled the Can Lao secret police's marching and torture styles on Nazi designs. Ngo Dinh Can, his younger brother, was put in charge of the former Imperial City of Hue. Although Can did not hold any official role in the government, he ruled his regions of South Vietnam with an iron fist, commanding private armies and secret police.
Another brother, Ngo Dinh Luyen, was appointed Ambassador to the United Kingdom. Diem’s elder brother Ngo Dinh Thuc was the archbishop of Hue. Despite this, Thuc lived in the Presidential Palace, along with Nhu, Nhu's wife and Diem. Diem was nationalistic, devoutly Catholic, anti-Communist, and preferred the philosophies of Confucianism. The result was that in a situation such as this one, the troops were drinking in the bar instead of chasing down and destroying a defeated enemy force. Sadly, we’d seen it all before.
“So Colonel Goldberg and Miles Anderson think that a few thousand Montagnards will make all the difference?” Paul said, shaking his head in disgust. “Even the SS would have had a hard task defeating the Viet Cong, this place is going to become another Eastern Front if this is all they have to fight with.”
He was right, of course. The communists had defeated the French, it seemed that the Republic of South Vietnam was militarily very weak even with American support, it could only be a matter of time.
“What if the Americans lend even more support?” I asked him. “Do you not think it would make a difference?”
He laughed. “Sure, of course it would make a difference, but they can’t be here forever. Ho Chi Minh is in it for the long haul. Do you remember the communists handing out free land to the peasants? What is this government doing to help these poor bastards? I tell you, Jurgen, if I was a peasant here I think I'd fight for the Viet Cong myself, and I hate the communists."
It was true, Diem initially limited individual land holdings and reimbursed the landlords for the excess which he sold off to peasants. This being Vietnam, many landlords evaded the redistribution by transferring their property to the name of family members. In addition, the three hundred and seventy thousand acres of Catholic Church land were exempted. As a result, only thirteen percent of South Vietnam's land was redistributed, it was estimated that only ten per cent of the tenants had received any land at all, resulting in a lasting legacy of bitterness and hate towards the government.
We drank several more beers and then went back to watch over the aircraft and its cargo. The ARVNs were still in the bar drinking, I had no doubt they’d be there all night. The airfield had gone quiet and we took turns to stay on watch, but there were no more attacks. We waited as the humidity rose, at just after ten o’clock a lorry and two jeeps arrived to unload the cargo. A short, scrawny looking young Viet was in charge, accompanied by two tough looking Americans with aviator dark glasses and shoulder holsters, probably Special Forces or CIA. So the crates were filled with weapons, I wondered if that was the reason for last night’s attack, and how the VCs had found out. Their intelligence was amazingly good, they seemed to be able to communicate better than the army with their sophisticated radio equipment. Six Viet civilians jumped down from the lorry and began to transfer the cargo. The Viet in charge, Le Van Dao came and paid me for the freight and they drove away. It wasn’t long before the welcome sight of our Hotc
hkiss jeep came towards us, the back laden with the spare wheel leg, the wheel and tyre and a selection of tools and jacks lashed around it. Johann climbed out and we shook hands, then he went to look at the damage.
“Yeah, we can fix that, no problem. First thing is to jack her out of there, I’ll put some support under the wheel and we can replace the whole unit.”
It was good news, we worked through the sweltering heat of the day, drenched in sweat, jacking up the port wing, removing the broken leg and replacing it with the spare. While Johann finished adjusting and testing the hydraulics, Paul and I loaded the broken parts into the empty hold of the C-47, they would be repaired and re-used when we got back to Saigon. I started the engines and slowly taxied the aircraft away from the pothole. When he was satisfied, Johann jumped in and came through to the cockpit.
“I want you to slowly taxi a couple of hundred yards and I’ll walk along to give a final visual check on that leg.”
I nodded to him and he went out and jumped back down to the ground. I started to taxi again, after two hundred yards I stopped and Johann jumped back into the aircraft and came into the cockpit.
“It all looks fine. I’ll drive back to Saigon now, I’ll see you there.”
“Thanks, Johann, I’ll have a couple of cold beers ready for you when you get back,” Paul laughed.
“You’d better.” He jumped down to the ground and was halfway across to the Hotchkiss when there was a massive explosion and the jeep disintegrated in smoke and flames. Mortar! The shock wave of the explosion had blown Johann to the ground.